Sunday, February 28, 2016

6
Guns is a not very special but acceptable
straight-to-video Western, a project of the Van Dyke clan. It’s currently
available on Netflix. It’s better than the average made-for-TV or Hallmark
offering, being a touch more adult and gritty.

The star is Barry, son of Dick Van Dyke,
and the director is Shane (a good Western name), a grandson of the faux-Cockney
comic star. It’s the only Western of both. Still, you’ve got to start
somewhere.

I've seen worse

Barry plays a vaguely Clintish bounty
hunter (all the rage at the moment on this blog), taciturn, tough and tenacious.
He is cornily described in the dialogue as “the best bounty hunter in the West”.
The movie opens with a cloyingly heart-warming happy-family scene in a cabin
with loving husband and wife with two angelic children, but this (overdone) domestic
bliss is shattered by a band of five brutal outlaws led by savage Lee Horn (stuntman
Geoff Meed, not bad as principal baddie) and his lowlife confederates. The gang
murder the little boys, also shoot to death the honest sheriff-husband (Brian
Wimmer, star of a 2006 Butch Cassidy spin-off The Outlaw Trail: The Treasure of Butch Cassidy) and proceed to
rape the wife. They are not nice at all.

The wife, Selina (Sage Mears), survives but
becomes the town drunk. Our bounty-hunter hero (as you know, bounty hunters in
Westerns are semi-bad but generally on the side of Right), who goes by the
Western name of Frank Allison, takes pity on her and essays to rehabilitate the
fallen woman. She cleans up and begs Frank to teach her to shoot. He reluctantly
agrees. So far, so fairly standard, but in this day and age it’s a young woman
who learns to be a gunfighter and gets her revenge, not a man. The bounty
huntress is born.

Shooting lesson

It’s all set in Arizona, around Bisbee,
though shot in California. They use a rather sepia coloring to give it ‘age’
and a hint of nostalgia.

Well, the badmen leave but return when
they hear that Selina has survived, for she is a witness who must be
eliminated. The sheriff (Greg Evigan, who had been in Shadow on the Mesa and another TV movie, Mail Order Bride) is understandably nervous for he is not as tough
as Frank and indeed, he is duly violently removed from the action by the gang.
So it’s all up to Frank to resist the hateful five. But wait, for here comes
Selina…

So there’s a final showdown in Bisbee and I shall
not tell you who wins, though you may guess.

An outlaw bites the dust

It’s all OK, I guess, and you could
watch it. I personally wouldn’t splash out on a DVD purchase but if it came on
TV you could give it a go. I’m not sure what the title refers to. There were
five guns of the badmen, and seven if you count the good guys. It has a modern
slightly feminist tinge to it and the last scene (unthinkable in earlier
Westerns) reinforces that.

Friday, February 26, 2016

Not the best André De Toth/Randolph Scott Western but still pretty good

Hollywood was always interested in the
bounty hunter. In Westerns this breed of gunman was ambivalent, a badman acting
as a sort of lawman, a fellow with base motives (money) yet bringing dangerous
criminals to justice for the good of society. It wasn’t easy to make a bounty
hunter a hero: when Steve McQueen was pursuing villains on TV for the bounty in Wanted: Dead or Alive the positive side of
catching criminals had to be played up and the financial side quietly forgotten (it's a wonder Josh made a living because he so often donated his bounty to worthy widows, etc.)
In movies the bounty hunter bringing in a corpse draped over a saddle was often
shunned as a lowlife but he was a kind of hero nevertheless; think of Henry Fonda in The Tin Star as an example.
Sergio Leone didn’t bother about the hero business: in For a Few Dollars More (a movie which definitely cites The Bounty Hunter) his bounty hunter
(Lee van Cleef) has few pretensions to nobility; he’s just a ruthless gunman.
But that was a spaghetti and as we know, spaghettis aren’t proper Westerns.

Of course the whole ‘dead or alive’
notion was phony. In 1872 the Supreme Court in Taylor v. Taintor ruled that bounty
hunters were a part of the law enforcement system.

Whenever they [those pursuing fugitives] choose to
do so, they may seize him [the person who has skipped bail] and deliver him up
to his discharge; and if it cannot be done at once, they may imprison him until
it can be done. They may exercise their rights in person or by agent. They may
pursue him into another state; may arrest him on the Sabbath; and if necessary,
may break and enter his house for that purpose.

But there was no authorization to kill
the fellow. Most of those ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’ posters you see are modern
inventions derived from the celluloid West.

Phony

Still, since when have we allowed a mere
detail such as historical fact to get in the way of enjoyment of a Western on the screen?

The
Bounty Hunter was Randolph Scott’s 48th Western and
one of the series he did with Warner Brothers. It was shot in 1953 when Scott
was already 55 years old but he could still romance the girl and convince as an
action hero. In fact Scott was one of those fortunate men who grew more
handsome as he aged and the 1950s were in many ways his golden age. The Bounty Hunter is not the best of the
Warners Westerns (that was probably Carson City) but it’s pretty damn good nevertheless.

A goodie

It was the last Western Scott did with
director André De Toth. De Toth had loved the Western, that most American of
film, and had made five starring Randy before this one, and he had a high
regard for Scott. But De Toth wanted to move on. While he spoke highly of Scott as a good Western actor, he didn't warm to him. He once called him an abacus, a reference to Scott's habit of counting his money, and reading The Wall Street Journal between takes on set.A
curious fact is that De Toth made rather a thing of 3D pictures – one of his
most famous films was the 3D horror movie House
of Wax, shot the same year as The
Bounty Hunter - and this was odd for a one-eyed man who couldn’t see in 3D
at all.

3D. Duck!

The Bounty Hunter was
designed as a 3D (the format was all the rage in ’53) and thus has much aiming
guns at the camera (and a sheriff’s hat shot off which whizzes into the
audience’s face) but it was released in ’54 in standard format, which is how we
all see it today of course.

André De Toth's last Western with Scott

The
Bounty Hunter is the story of notorious Jim Kipp
(Scott), ruthless hunter-down of wanted men who, in the classic Western way,
shoots a fugitive in the rocks in the first reel, brings the body in flung over
the man’s own horse and dumps it at the sheriff’s office, demanding the $500
reward. He won’t even give back ten bucks of the price for a pine box. He’s not
there for charity. In town, he is feared and shunned. He is told, "Well, you know what they say about you, you'd turn in your own grandmother on her birthday if there was a reward on her."

It turns out later, of course, that Jim Kipp’s
pa owned a store and was shot and killed there by robbers. Jim was too young then
to do anything about it but when he was old enough he vowed to devote his life
to bringing in such villains, dead or alive. So really, he’s a fighter for
justice. Well, he was Randolph Scott. Later in the story he does his Randy act
and we see the pain on his face as he remembers his daddy’s demise and we sense
his Scott-ish nobility.

Anyway, it’s a good actionful start. The
story was again written by Winston Miller. Miller had started penning B
Westerns in the 1930s, getting his grounding, and after World War II had
blossomed rather, notably contributing largely to the great My Darling Clementine. But he also wrote
or co-wrote other good oaters like Station West and Fury at Furnace Creek(both
1948) and he had worked on the excellent Carson
City for Randy in ’52. He does a fine job on The Bounty Hunter because it is a whodunnit, or ‘who’s the quarry’
but Miller gives us few clues – and plenty of false leads. We are kept guessing
till the very end. Actually, there’s a No Name on the Bullet vibe to it: in the 1959 Audie Murphy picture too (one of
Murphy’s best Westerns), a stranger gunman comes to town looking for someone,
and the pressure builds as the townsfolk get increasingly paranoid. I’m sure
the Universal team that made No Name
had seen The Bounty Hunter. They must
have done.

The movie was shot in bright Warnercolor
(the earlier De Toth/Scott Western had been that process’s first outing) with cinematography
by Edwin DuPar, who had started in the silent days and latterly had shot Silver River and Springfield Rifle for Warners. The locations were Red Rock Canyon
and the Warner Ranch, i.e. California, which did as stand-ins for the
Kansas/Indian Territory setting of the story – were probably more attractive
and more ‘Western’. Visually the picture is pleasing.

The cast isn’t bad. Among the
hunted-looking townsmen are Howard Petrie (he’s the sheriff) and Ernest
Borgnine, the limping hotelier. Harry Antrim (the doctor from Devil’s Doorway) is a suspicious doc and
Dub Taylor, often Russell Hayden or Charles Starrett’s sidekick Cannonball, is
the equally shady postmaster. I thought Robert Keys (Kansas Pacific, San Antone, Rails into Laramie) was good as the
smooth gunman-gambler, another suspicious character.

Ernest is the suspicious hotel keeper

There are, naturally, two dames with
whom the hero may dally, the prim and proper daughter of the doc (Dolores Dorn
in her only Western) and a racier saloon gal (Marie Windsor, leading lady or ‘the
other woman’ in a good number of B-Westerns). As to be expected, Randy weds the
former in the last scene.

The bounty hunter (he's just been to church) with doc's daughter and sheriff

Marie Windsor is the saloon gal

A key regular member of the cast of
Scott Westerns is there too, his fancy palomino Stardust. So that’s good.

There’s some good De Toth action, though
the fistfight is dealt with in a comic way unusual for the director. The story
appears to be set in the 1870s, as so many of these films were, but the pistols
look very modern for that.

The
Bounty Hunter is no great film of Hollywood history
but if you are a fan of good Western movies it’s a must.

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Only two years after constructing the
Canadian Pacific in Cariboo Trail for
Fox, pistol-packing railroad engineer Randolph Scott was down in Nevada for
Warners laying rails between Virginia City and Carson City. He did it with
aplomb because he was Randolph Scott, one of the best Western actors ever.

The best of Randy's Westerns for Warners

Of course Randy knew Virginia City quite well, having been there in 1940 with Errol Flynn. But that's another story.It’s a bright, breezy romp, a pretty
standard plot but done with panache. It was André De Toth’s fourth Western as
director, and his second with Randy. It was shot in the studio’s new
Warnercolor, and was written by Sloan Nibley, a Roy Rogers regular, and Winston
Miller, who had co-written My Darling Clementine. The New York Times review at the time said, “Sloan Nibley and Winston Miller, the
scenarists; Andre De Toth, who directed, and practically the entire cast have
performed their assignments with a competent jauntiness that suggests they
weren't out to fool anybody.”

Massey slightly less awful than usual

I like Carson City. It’s a lot of fun. It’s true it has Raymond Massey as
the principal villain (replacing Charles Ruggles), and Massey was a bad actor
all his life, a dreadful ham and especially bad in Westerns (e.g. Sugarfoot, also with Randy). But he does
somehow manage to keep his overacting in check this time, a bit anyway. Perhaps
it was De Toth. And he does have James Millican as his chief henchman, always a
help - in fact Millican's restrained acting shows Massey up.

Millican is chief henchperson

The dame is a bit of a pain too,
newspaper editor’s daughter Susan Mitchell (Warner starlet du jour Lucille Norman, an ex-singer in pretty well her only female
lead and her only Western). Norman’s character hovers between the silly and the
dumb. She also has make-up apparently applied with a trowel.

He gets her in the end and they ride off on the caboose

But all the rest is just dandy. A banker
and a railroad baron (Larry Keating and Thurston Hall), whom you expect to be
crooked but aren’t, want, rather absurdly, to build a rail link to avoid the
stage robberies plaguing the Comstock area. They get happy-go-lucky railroad
engineer Silent Jeff Kincaid, just back from Panama and discovered slugging it
out in a saloon, to build the line through mountainous terrain. Little does
Randy know at the time (in fact it takes most of the movie before he works it
out, doh) that mine-owner Massey is the one behind the stage robberies. He runs
a gang dubbed The Champagne Bandits, so-called because Massey believes that if
you treat the stage passengers to a slap-up picnic with fancy booze and only rob the
bankers, the bandits will get their sympathy. He may have had a point.

Well, Randy arrives in Carson City to
find his half-brother Alan (Richard Webb, small part in Distant Drums, later to become a regular of TV Westerns) and his
(Randy's) childhood sweetheart Susan (la Norman). Alan is dead-set on bringing Susan to the
altar so he doesn’t welcome brother Jeff at all. Work on the railroad starts
under Silent Jeff’s direction (actually he is far from silent; perhaps it was
an ironic moniker) and he is helped by a rough crew under competent foreman
Hardrock Haggerty (William Haade, usually a Western heavy). It’s a post-war
pro-progress American film.

There’s a lot of action, well handled as
usual by De Toth, with bar-room brawls (with a thrown chair breaking the mirror
behind the bar, obviously), murders, landslides, and mucho chasin’ and shootin’.
There’s a lot of energy in the picture.

Excellent train - and it's held up too

There’s an excellent train, held up in
the last reel. There’s a final shoot-out in the rocks (Bronson Canyon), not
quite up to Winchester ’73 standards
maybe but at least as good as many other oaters (I'm sure Budd Boetticher had seen Carson City and admired that sequence). Altogether, the movie is very
satisfactory.

The movie was slated to be directed by
Michael Curtiz but he dropped out once Errol Flynn (who disliked Westerns) turned
it down. I’m glad: De Toth and Scott were better. Carson City is probably the best Western Warners did with Scott. The
movie premiered in Carson City, natch, and made a lot of dough for the studio. I almost gave it four revolvers. Probably would have done if it had some better character actors in other parts.

Monday, February 22, 2016

Law
of the Land (no relation to the 1917 silent movie
or the Australian or American 1990s TV series) is a made-for-TV Western movie
starring Jim Davis and a young Don Johnson. It was first aired on NBC in 1976. It isn’t
very good.

Still, it’s always enjoyable to see Jim
and it’s quite amusing to see Don in his mid-twenties, nearly a decade before
his decade-defining goings-on in Miami. He’d been the star of the LQ
Jones-directed so-called “sci-fi cult classic” A Boy and his Dog the year before but Westernwise he has hardly
been a specialist. Being third billed in the psychedelic ‘Western’ Zacariah in 1971, co-star with Mickey
Rourke in the contemporary ‘Western’ Harley
Davidson and the Marlboro Man, and an appearance in an episode of Kung Fu hardly constitute a Western
career. Later he starred in a ‘proper’ Western, the 1995 TV movie In Pursuit of Honor, and of course more
recently he was Big Daddy in Django Unchained, but that’s about it. In Law
of the Land he plays a charming young rogue who is finally conscripted by Sheriff
Jim to wear a deputy’s badge. He’s OK, I guess, despite his 1970s hair.

Pre-Dallas
Jim Davis made a good tough sheriff. He looks his age a bit (well, he’s
entitled, he was born in 1909) but he’s still got the grit. This was his
penultimate lead role in a Western (he died in 1981). He’d been a major feature
of the genre since 1942, mainly for Republic, and did both good guy and black-hat
roles with rangy, slow-speaking aplomb. Later he would be Jock Ewing on TV and
all through his career TV had been important (in the mid-1950s he was of course
railroad detective Matt Clark, capturing every Western outlaw there ever was on
Stories of the Century). In Law of the Land, he’s a lawman who has
no truck with weakness or criminality and one look at his craggy face and silver hair will tell you that.

He has a whole team of deputies, even
before Don joins up. There’s the capable Arapaho Tom Condor (Cat Bellini,
who’d had a smallish part in Little Big Man but didn’t really do Westerns), the equally loyal Brad (Nicholas Hammond,
Friedrich in The Sound of Music, not
exactly a qualification), the young hopeful Dudley whom Jim treats as a general
factotum (toothy Charles Martin Smith, The Toad in American Graffiti, later to be in The Spikes Gang, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid and The Culpepper
Cattle Co.) and lead deputy, the sheriff’s pal Andy (Glenn Corbett in his
last Western, fittingly a TV show for he had spent most of his Western career
on the small screen). Andy is shot, though, so is written out after a reel or
two. If TV movies have reels.

It’s a murder mystery, though it’s
pretty easy to guess who dunnit. Spoiler alert: it’s ‘guest star’ Andrew Prine,
John Wayne buddy who’d been a regular of TV Western shows since 1960,
especially Wide Country, but had also
done some big-screen oaters, notably as McSween in Chisum). He’s a deranged ex-Confederate colonel become serial
killer of saloon gals.

Well, it’s all rather predictable and unremarkable,
I fear, and you won’t miss much if you never see it. Still, Jim is good and
there is a train (and even a turntable). There’s a typewriter (invented in the
1860s, apparently) and I do like Victorian gadgets in Westerns. There’s also a
consumptive dentist (consumptive dentists seemed to populate the West quite densely). You
could watch it.

Saturday, February 20, 2016

Not being a Barbara Stanwyck fan, I find
it hard to like The Maverick Queen.
Still, I have done my best, and can report several positive features of this
mid-50s oater.

Barbara Stanwyck is a bossy unpleasant cattlewoman. How unusual.

Republic pushed the boat out on this
one, filming it in their Trucolor and their widescreen 'Naturama' in very handsome Colorado locations. I’m a
real Royal Gorge fan so it was great to see the train chugging through it from
Silverton, and the robbery was excellent. The DP was Jack Marta, something of a
Western specialist who worked on Dark Command and Cat Ballou, among many
others. Visually, it’s a very nice picture and there are almost hints of Loyal
Griggs Shanery here and there.

Widescreen

And then the support cast. Lots of
familiar names pop up: Wallace Ford, Jim Davis, Emile Meyer, John Doucette.
Always nice to see them. The stars, apart from Ms. Stanwyck, who was never less
than tiresome, are not at all bad. Barry Sullivan is the leading man. First
seen in range duds, he soon changes into proper Barryesque frock coat and silk
vest, and deals faro in the Maverick Queen (for it’s the name of Stanwyck’s
saloon). Sullivan was never in the very top flight of Western actors but could
usually be relied upon to turn in a solid performance, especially in a frock
coat. He would of course return to co-star with la Stanwyck in Forty Guns the following year (a trashy
picture if ever there was one). In fact Stanwyck plays a similar role in both The Maverick Queen and Forty Guns, a bossy, unpleasant cattlewoman
with grande dame pretensions.

Yes, well.

And third billed we have Scott Brady.
Now, I am definitely (or mos’ def as they say these days) a fan of Scott and
his bros. They were actually Tierneys (pity: we could have called them the
Brady bunch) and they all had a bit of a rep for being tearways. Lawrence Tierney
was notorious for bar-room brawls, drinking a lot, getting stabbed and the like and brother
Gerard (the Scott was a later stage name) didn’t hang about either, with
narcotics charges, illegal bookmaking activities and suchlike dogging his
career. But both (and Edward too) were great value on the screen, especially as
heavies and hoodlums. Westernwise, Lawrence only did five (though he was Jesse James twice, in Best of the Badmen and Badman's Territory) but
Scott Brady made quite a thing of them. Many Westernistas will remember him as Shotgun Slade on TV but he started
big-screen Westerns in 1949 (one of those awful Yvonne de Carlo efforts), was Bloody
Bill Anderson in Kansas Raiders the
year after, and he was the Dancin’ Kid in Johnny Guitar in ’54. His first lead part in an oater was that year too, when he
was Billy the Kid in Columbia’s The Law
vs. Billy the Kid (with the excellent James Griffith as Pat Garrett) –
which I see to my shame we haven’t reviewed yet. Must get round to that.
Anyway, it’s always good to see Scott Brady with a sixgun, especially if he is
a baddy.

Scott as a mean Sundance Kid. Stanwyck romances him but then throws him over for Barry. Scott doesn't care for that at all.

And he’s a baddy in The Maverick Queen alright; in fact he is the principal baddy, the
meanest hombre in a whole gang of outlaws. For this is a Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid picture, and Scott is Sundance. But no good-bad Robert
Redford-type Sundance he. Nay, he is mean through ‘n’ through. And rather dirty, scruffy and unshaven too. Howard Petrie is
Butch Cassidy, and a very commanding leader he is as well, ordering minions about hither and yon (the real Butch was no
bandit king and was more or less accepted as the leader at different times). Petrie’s
part is much smaller, though, and Butch doesn’t have all that much to say or
do. It’s really a Sundance movie.

Sullivan, Stanwyck, Brady: a love/hate triangle

Among the gang at the Hole on the Wall (the
story is set in Wyoming, not Colorado) are George Keymas as Muncie and John
Doucette as Loudmouth, but they are the only named desperadoes. The whole Wild
Bunch numbers eleven (I counted them) but heaven knows who the others were.

Barry is Jeff Younger, a nephew of Bob
and Jim’s. Or he says he is. Various remarks, and the clothes and guns, lead us
to believe the story is set soon after the Civil War, which is a bit odd
considering that the Wild Bunch didn’t maraud until the 1890s but Westerns are
not famous for respecting chronology or historical fact, are they? Later in the movie Jim
Davis turns up, also in a frock coat, and says he is Jeff Younger. Well, it’s all very confusing. I don’t think
Cole and Jim even had a nephew Jeff anyway.

Wallace Ford is a badman, which is a bit
unusual. He appears to be the loyal factotum of the rancher Lucy Lee (Mary
Murphy) but is actually a low-down spy for the Wild Bunch. The skunk.

Wallace is Mary Murphy's ranch cook but he's a spy for the Wild Bunch, the skunk

Kenneth Gamet wrote it and it’s supposed
to be based on a Zane Grey novel. Gamet was capable of good and
not-quite-so-good Western work: he did a lot of Randolph Scott oaters and
several were really quite classy, especially the outstanding Coroner Creek (based on a Luke Short
story). Later he wrote TV shows, especially Casey
Jones.The Maverick Queen is
tight and professional, I must say, if a tad corny here and there.

The director was good old Joseph Kane,
Republic’s top Western director, who worked especially with John Wayne, Roy Rogers
and Gene Autry. I like him because he was a cellist. He started writing silent Westerns
in 1925 and his first as credited director was a Ken Maynard oater in 1934. He was
still directing episodes of The Iron
Horse on TV in the late 60s. Respect. He does a good job on The Maverick Queen; it’s taut and pacy.

Worth a watch

Some of the music is good, by Victor
Young, though it occasionally strays into the portentous or overblown. The Ned
Washington ballad over the opening titles, sung by Joni James, is, however,
dire. And we have to suffer through it twice more during the movie.

If you’re expecting Butch and Sundance
to get away and go off to South America, I’m afraid (spoiler alert) you’re
going to be disappointed. They did not die under the guns of the Bolivian army
but at the hands of Barry and his fellow tough-guy Pinkertons, e.g. Emile.

If you are a Stanwyck groupie you’ll go
for The Maverick Queen big time. But
even if you are a normal human being you’ll get quite a lot out of it. It
certainly has its points. Itjust staggered to a three-revolver rating.

Thursday, February 18, 2016

Towards the end of his career, in the
mid-1960s, Audie Murphy’s contract with Universal ran out. New management was
less interested in contract stars and thought Westerns were a thing of the
past, the dolts. Audie made a few pictures for Columbia from 1964 to ’67 and other studios
too, but there was no doubt that his star was on the wane. Still, the Columbia
oaters were very decent, with similar production values and budgets to the
Universal ones – that is to say not stellar but adequate. The movies were
formulaic but attractive visually, with good camerawork, nice color and fine ‘Western’
locations.

The mixture as before, but still quite good

Such a one was The Quick Gun, another go-round of the plot about coming back to
town after time away gunslinging because Pa has died and the hero wants the
ranch back. Then he’s going to hang up his guns, you know how they do. Audie is
Clint Cooper and this Clint has gained a rep as a fast gun, I mean a quick gun,
and not on the right side of the law either. The townsfolk shun him for this on
his return and because he bumped off a couple of their number before departing
(though of course it was only self-defense).

Audie wants to hang up his guns

The good news is that Ted de Corsia is Spangler,
the outlaw boss of the gang which hitherto counted Clint among its ranks. I
always like Ted. Big and brawny with a growl of a voice, he was ideal as a
heavy in Westerns, or any other genre come to that. In fact he started as the
killer in The Lady from Shanghai. He
was a regular of TV Western shows but he also did a great many big-screen
oaters, usually B-Westerns, and you can often see him bossing gangs or henching
other heavies. Ted plays Spangler as a charismatic but ruthless villain with panache, and he
does an excellent job.

The honest sheriff in town, who turns
out to be a rival for the gal (Merry Anders as “Helen over at the schoolhouse”)
but is awfully decent about it when she opts for Audie, is James Best. Often the
bad guy in Westerns, Best could also do good lawmen (I’m not thinking of The Dukes of Hazzard here). He was in
over a hundred Westerns altogether, mostly TV shows but he started in a classy big-screen
oater, Winchester ’73 in 1950, and he
knew Audie well because he had been Cole Younger to Murphy’s Jesse James in Kansas Raiders the same year. In The Quick Gun Sheriff Best sacrifices
himself and is cruelly shot down by bandit Ted but his heroism helps to save
the town. Actually, it’s mainly the Reverend’s fault: he (Charles Meredith)
urges the sheriff to go reason with Ted, a foolish and doomed attempt that gets him killed.

With Sheriff Best

Another good thing: Frank Ferguson is a
leading townsman, Helen’s dad, who bravely stands by Clint, helps him get the
better of the renegades and is shot in the shoulder for his pains. I always
like Frank. It’s that droopy mustache and sloping eyebrows. They make him look
like an avuncular walrus.

Ray Hatton is “Elderly man” and Gregg
Palmer (a member of John Wayne’s stock company) is there too. I like to see old
familiar faces in these movies.

There are some good brawls, especially one
in a barn where the protagonists fight with those hooks they use to grab straw
bales. The climactic gunfight when the outlaws attack the town is a bit
one-sided: although the townsmen outnumber Ted’s gang and are well positioned
behind burning barricades they still manage to get shot down, and the baddies
take the town.

I like the French poster

Ted starts with a dozen men but luckily
a few are shot down so that when they take the town the gang
comprises the right and proper number of seven. As you know, all gangs, posses
and suchlike ought to number seven in Westerns.

Talking of shooting, the movie was nicely
photographed by Lester Shorr, who had been working on Westerns since Cimarron in 1931 and became a regular DP
on TV oaters, especially Bonanza. It’s
supposed to be 1873 Montana but the California locations did well enough. The
director was good old Sidney Salkow, a Columbia steady who had been directing (and
writing) cowboy movies since 1952. Probably his biggest efforts were Sitting Bull in 1954 and Robbers’ Roost in ’55, though he spent
most of his Western time on TV shows, especially Fury and Tales of Wells Fargo.
He does a workmanlike job on this Audie outing and the movie rattles along.There's a High Noonish bit in the last reel when she shoots the bad guy in the back to save her lover.

By the way, both Ferguson and Best teamed up with Audie again soon after, in The Cimarron Kid.

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Hollywood
loved the Texas Rangers. Of course silver screen Rangers were all noble and
there were no incompetent, brutal or racist men among them. Mike Cox, in his
book The Texas Rangers: Wearing the Cinco
Peso, 1821 – 1900 (Forge, 2008), lists no fewer than 118 movies from 1910
to 1995 featuring Texas Rangers. Zane Grey’s best-seller The Lone StarRanger of 1915 had been a seminal work of Ranger
mythology; it was a silent movie twice (1919 with William Farnum and 1923
starring Tom Mix) and a talkie in 1930 with George O’Brien as lead. Buck Jones
starred in The Texas Ranger in 1931.

In 1935
Walter Prescott Webb published his book The
Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense, extolling their virtues in
glowing terms. This will give you a flavor:

The real Ranger has been a very
quiet, deliberate, gentle person who could gaze calmly into the eye of a
murderer, divine his thoughts, and anticipate his action, a man who could ride
straight up to death. In fatal encounter – the last resort of a good officer –
the Ranger has had the unhurried courage to take the extra fraction of a second
essential to accuracy which was at a premium in the art and the science of
Western pistology.

Webb’s
Rangers were thus gentle, telepathic killers. But his writings were very
influential and it is certain that King Vidor and co-writer Elizabeth Hill
(Mrs. Vidor) had read him. Vidor was looking to make an epic, big-budget patriotic
Western the following year, Texas’s centennial. He produced, directed and
co-wrote with his wife the motion picture The
Texas Rangers; it was thus a personal project. The resulting movie (like the Zane Grey tale, it would be remade, so the legend has been durable) was by
modern standards a corny whitewash but still, it has its points.

French poster rather good

The story is
one of three happy-go-lucky outlaws, Jim, Sam and comic-relief Wahoo.
They rob stages humorously and exchange badinage. But they get separated, and
Jim and Wahoo, hard up and jobless, join the Texas Rangers, while Sam goes it
alone, leading a gang of rustlers. When they run across Sam again (he's rustling), Jim’s plan is to get the inside information
on gold shipments and the like so that Sam and his bandidos can steal them.

Wahoo is the
first to get religion. He likes it in the Rangers and doesn’t want to be a
badman anymore. Jim has no truck with this and continues his nefarious
collaboration with Sam until he too realizes that he is more Ranger than outlaw and he
makes a deal with Sam, now known as the Polka-Dot Bandit, under the terms of
which each will leave the other alone as both go their separate ways.

That’s fine
until Ranger Jim is sent on a mission to capture Polka-Dot…

That’s about
the plot. Of course there’s a girl for Jim to romance, the Rangers Major’s
daughter, Amanda, and there’s a feisty orphan boy, Davy, whom the compadres
rescue from an Indian attack on his family’s cabin – he now lives with Amanda. Neither
Jim nor Davy wants anything to do with girls and civilized domesticity at first but
both are eventually worn down and subdued.

They got Fred
MacMurray to play Jim Hawkins (no relation to RLS). He was a Paramount contract
player who had risen to stardom and in 1935 he had played opposite Claudette
Colbert, Katharine Hepburn and Carol Lombard, but he had never done a Western,
so it was something of a risk. He acquitted himself well, though, and was
quite convincing as both a light-hearted outlaw in the first reel and the tough
Texas Ranger later in the movie when it gets much darker and more serious. MacMurray would go on to
make eleven more Westerns (see for example Gun for a Coward or Face of a Fugitive) and was surprisingly good in them. The Texas Rangers part had originally been
intended for Gary Cooper, though, and while Fred may make a fair fist of it, he
was no Coop.

Fred rides the range with Jack Oakie

Sam McGee,
the outlaw pard who would go on to be the bandit king Polka-Dot, was played by
Lloyd Nolan. Nolan had also found success at Paramount, getting two lead roles
in 1935 and starring with James Cagney and George Raft – gangster movies were
his thing. The Texas Rangers was his
first time in the saddle too. He would go on to get a biggish part in Wells Fargo with Joel McCrea the
following year but would only do five Western movies in his career, though he
became a regular on Western TV shows in the 50s and 60s. He’s not terribly
convincing as bandit chief, I fear, though he does try for a certain
charming-rogue style with a hint of steel beneath.

Lloyd Nolan as the Polka-Dot Bandit

As for the
comic-relief Wahoo Jones, that part went to popular comedian Jack Oakie. Oakie
had been a big-name star of comedies and musicals through the end of the silent
era and into the talkies (despite being functionally deaf). His contract with Paramount
was not renewed in 1934 but he occasionally worked for the studio in a
freelance capacity and had starred with Clark Gable and Loretta Young in the
1935 The Call of the Wild. He
certainly makes the most of his role as Wahoo.

As they rescue a kid in the first reel and are kind to him, the outlaws are obviously goodies

These three
were joined by Jean Parker as Amanda. Yet another in her first Western, she
would go on to do quite a few – she would be Molly in The Gunfighter in 1950.

So the cast isn’t
bad, though by no means Western specialists.

Gabby Hayes
is a corrupt judge, amusing as ever.

Some of the black
& white photography, by Edward Cronjager, is very good (Cronjager was a real artist). The locations
were in New Mexico, in fact, not Texas, but never mind. There’s also some
stirring music by Gerard Carbonara – though the intro and outro ballad is cheesy.

I actually
prefer the 1949 color remake, Streets of Laredo, mainly because it starred William Holden, who was an outstandingly
good Western actor. But still, the original The
Texas Rangers is well worth a watch. It almost made three revolvers. Might have made four with Coop as star.